Latest reports: Israel has now attacked a facility in Syria

Wars and rumors of wars… OK, let’s sort this out, at least until the next update.  (This is how intelligence works, incidentally.  You work with what you’ve got until the next update.)

The IAF attack on Friday (apparently, early on Friday morning) was targeting an arms shipment.  This was indicated by the profile of the attack, and there has been no reason to revise that assessment.  News and blog sites reference reports that the attack targeted an arms shipment that came from Iran.

New reporting indicates another attack in Damascus, which demonstrates a profile more consistent with an attack on a facility.  The Tower recounts

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Interdicting arms to Hezbollah? New report of Israeli air strikes in Syria

The latest report that the Israeli Air Force has conducted an attack in Syria comes not from the Syrian rebels but from U.S. officials.  Why our officials might be talking to the media about this is a separate topic.  More on it in a moment.

The attack

The information disclosed to the media is sketchy; it’s not even clear that the target was actually in Syria, as opposed to Lebanon.  I heard on Fox earlier this evening that people in Lebanon had reported seeing IAF aircraft overhead during the period in question (some time Thursday or Friday).  The statement(s) of U.S. officials indicate that we don’t think the IAF aircraft entered Syrian air space to conduct the attack.

The overall description of the Israeli strike package –

Syria: Israel, at least, is militarily ready

Several websites have picked up on a UPI report that the Israeli Air Force attacked a chemical weapons site in the Damascus area on Saturday.  The report is unconfirmed by any official source, but it is credible.  There are caveats, however.

The site in question, if it was struck, was probably the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), long known to be a key facility in Assad’s chemical and biological weapons program.  (See here as well.)

“Mossomo” at Flopping Aces put together an excellent timeline back in February on the events leading up to a previous unconfirmed report that the IAF had struck the SSRC.  This strike was reportedly conducted

Dead child in Egyptian prime minister’s arms killed by Hamas, not Israel

Elder of Ziyon has the story.  The four-year-old boy, whose lifeless body Egyptian prime minister Hesahm Kandil was photographed holding in his arms, was killed in Annazla, near Gaza City.

But the IDF wasn’t attacking in the area at the time of the explosion that killed young Mahmoud.  Indeed, it conducted no air attacks at all while Kandil was in Gaza on Saturday, which was the timeframe of the fatal explosion in Annazla, according to neighbors of 4-year-old Mahmoud Sadallah.

The New York Times reports that the damage done in the explosion was too light to be from an Israeli bomb,

Attacks on Israel – and one on an arms factory in Sudan

While Americans pondered the implications of a presidential strategy involving “Big Bird, Binders, and Bayonets” over the last day and a half, things have been heating up in the Levant.

Hamas launched 68 rockets at Israel in the space of 12 hours, from the evening of 23 October to the early morning of the 24th – a sustained level of fire more consonant with a tactical offensive than with the more typical Hamas campaign of occasional “pinprick” attacks.  Most of the rockets were short-range projectiles, not susceptible to intercept by Iron Dome.  But Iron Dome intercepted 7 longer-range rockets.  Two foreign agricultural workers reportedly sustained serious injuries, and a handful of others received lighter injuries.  There was damage to some buildings.

Israeli forces took out